[Nhcoll-l] Duke Petition

Fri Feb 16 13:00:42 EST 2024

I agree broadly with Doug’s point here – email campaigns and petitions can only go so far, and are unlikely to convince people who are not already in agreement.

At what point to more drastic measures become justified?
I was thinking personally about the idea of an academic boycott of Institutions / Departments that egregiously abdicate their responsibilities to their biological and cultural heritage collections (a form of abdicating responsibility to the public).

For example – issuing a public letter in an op-ed or journal article that the undersigned individuals will refuse to write letters of recommendation for colleagues or students applying to positions at a given institution, and refuse to participate in conferences or events at said institution unless some deal is reached. Some (including myself) might be uneasy about this kind of action and its consequences, but the message that must be sent is that administrative abandonment of natural history collections will have widespread negative repercussions.

Perhaps NSF should have a clause in collections or biodiversity related grants that require that Universities legally commit to maintaining these resources when they receive federal funding for them? We already sort of have this in the “specimen management plan” requirement, but vouchering requirements only work if the accepting collections can be expected to be maintained in perpetuity. It is one thing for small independent museum that is facing bankruptcy being forced by circumstance to shutter a collection. It is another thing entirely for an institution with an $11 Billion endowment that pulls billions more in federal research dollars each year just throwing their hands up and saying “we don’t want to replace these existing tenured faculty lines in this well-established department”. Especially considering they refused a multi-million dollar donation drive organized by an alumnus.

Actions like those recently taken by Duke’s administration constitute, effectively, abandonment of critical research infrastructure that belongs in part to the public, because it was paid for using public money and holds its collections for the benefit of the public. To add insult to injury, the justification provided by Duke is that the collections would be better cared for elsewhere. Implicit in that idea is the belief that MORE public money in the form of emergency rehousing grants, other institutions’ staff curatorial time, etc, SHOULD be spent on subsidizing their *entirely voluntary* decision to abandon the infrastructure.

-Nate
--
[The Ohio State University]
Nathaniel F. Shoobs
Curator of Mollusks
College of Arts & Sciences Dept. of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology
Museum of Biological Diversity, 1315 Kinnear Rd, Columbus, OH 43212
614-688-1342 (Office)
mbd.osu.edu<http://mbd.osu.edu>

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of Watkins-Colwell, Gregory <gregory.watkins-colwell at yale.edu>
Date: Friday, February 16, 2024 at 12:50 PM
To: Douglas Yanega <dyanega at gmail.com>, nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Duke Petition
Doug, You could write a letter directly to the President of Duke if you like. Or contact the Duke Alumni Center or something like that. I betcha a bunch of angry alumni would get some attention. I feel that any and all communication helps,

Doug,

You could write a letter directly to the President of Duke if you like. Or contact the Duke Alumni Center or something like that. I betcha a bunch of angry alumni would get some attention. I feel that any and all communication helps, even if only slightly.  It is certainly better than doing nothing, especially because we all know this sort of thing will continue to happen.

Greg

****************
Gregory J. Watkins-Colwell
Sr. Collection Manager, Herpetology and Ichthyology
Division of Vertebrate Zoology
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Package shipping address:
Greg Watkins-Colwell
Division of Vertebrate Zoology
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******************

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> On Behalf Of Douglas Yanega
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2024 12:17 PM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Duke Petition

If I might make a suggestion:

I have to confess that I'm not entirely convinced regarding the effectiveness of petitions and e-mail campaigns. Call me a cynic, but it seems too easy for the people on the receiving end to not even read the e-mails, and not even care who has signed on to the petitions.

Over the last few decades, if I've noticed any pattern among the failures versus successes in getting administrative decisions like this reversed, it's that the more visible and public the outcry, the better - newspaper stories, op-eds, radio interviews, and so forth - where the story is exposed to the light of day, and an entirely different level of pressure is applied. People act differently when they know that everyone is watching.

In that vein, I'd like to suggest that those of us who work in natural history collections can - in addition to the emails and petitions - also act more directly by producing a well-researched opinion piece, hitting as many "talking points" as possible, made public as quickly as possible, and made as broadly visible as possible.

Consider the following, for example:

The admins are thinking to move everything in the Duke Herbarium to other institutions. Do we know whether there are enough other institutions capable of assimilating that much material? How close to capacity are the other regional herbaria? How well-staffed and well-funded are those other herbaria? In other words, if the premise that the Duke admins are acting from is that they can find "good foster homes" for all these specimens, where they will be taken care of better than they could at Duke, can we provide them with evidence that this is NOT a viable plan, and that the other places the specimens could be sent don't have enough room, don't have enough staff, and don't have enough funding to take care of the material? I would suspect, myself, that even in the best case scenario, it's likely to be decades before that many fostered specimens could possibly all be integrated into their new homes, and made fully accessible to the research community again. Show that their basic premise is flawed, and why, in practical terms that they can understand.

I'm skeptical that career admins are going to find arguments about the biodiversity crisis compelling, but if we can give some stark and definitive statistics about collections, that might get their attention. Things like (1) the number of herbaria that have closed down in the last 50 years compared to the number that have been newly-created (2) trends in the number of grants going to herbaria over time, and the adjusted total dollar amounts OF those grants (3) trends in staffing over time. I'm betting that those figures won't look too good, and the worse they look, the more compelling the argument becomes, to not only keep the Duke herbarium open, but to invest MORE money into the facility. If they're truly concerned about making sure those specimens are well taken care of, then the best way to accomplish that is to make their present home the best home they could have. At the risk of a clumsy analogy, if parents are on the verge of divorce, the best thing for their kids is not to ship them all off to foster care, but to fix the marriage.

Bear in mind also that the more compelling the evidence that herbaria are struggling, and the situation getting worse, then by making the information very public, we can draw more attention to the general problem that we are ALL facing - and I doubt that it's going to reflect well on the Duke admins if they're perceived as kicking someone when they're down. Bad PR is compelling in its own special way.

I suspect that I am, in large part, preaching to the proverbial choir here, but grant me my moment of ranting.

All that said, I do not know the answers to the questions I've raised - I don't know what the relevant figures are, or how to obtain this information. Maybe there are list subscribers affiliated with SPNHC or AIBS, etc., who DO have these statistics at their fingertips, and would be willing to share them. For all I know, someone here has published a recent paper or given a talk about the state of US herbaria, and we can just cite that. Maybe someone here has a good idea of a venue and a format for composing a collective online document that a bunch of us can write interactively, and distribute widely once it's completed. Even if all that gets created is a list of "talking points", then as long as that list is shared, if any of us are interviewed, we have a resource we can turn to, and we can present a coherent and consistent message. I'm certainly not the one who can do all this, but if I can even get things started, I'll feel like I've done something constructive. Call me a cynic, but I'm thinking we might even need to build a playbook-style resource called "What to do in case someone threatens to shut down a collection" that we can refer to the next time this happens. And, sadly, we all KNOW it will happen again.

Peace,

--

Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum

Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega

phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)

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  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness

        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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